


Rake the sands until they surface

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:49:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28988079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: “I don’t think you have to worry about being like the people who left you a dungeon and a pit of scorpions.”“I am the thing that kills the things I kill.”
Relationships: Havelock Vetinari & Samuel Vimes, Havelock Vetinari/Samuel Vimes
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	Rake the sands until they surface

"What do you actually think you are making up for, doing this to yourself? What are you repenting?” Vimes sat on the edge of the landing where the staircase turned. 

The tortured eyes over knife-sharp cheekbones blinked slowly and looked away. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“The snow’s melted.” Sybil had said Vimes had come home in the morning with snow in his eyelashes. It had been a humid winter and he had been rubbing water out of his eyes for weeks.

“I’m keeping the traffic charge the same.”

“That’s not going to be popular.”

Lord Vetinari leaned back against the wall. “You’re not trying to make up for anything, what makes you think I am?” Vimes watched the way he moved, trying to gage how much the pain and stiffness was from exertion and exhaustion. 

“What makes you think I’m not?”

Vetinari thought of the years--no, decades--Vimes had spent drunk most of the time, barely surviving. “That was unthoughtful of me. I ask your forgiveness.”

They both made decisions every day that weighed on their consciences. They had to.

“I’ve told you I envy you,” Vetinari continued. “That is true. But I am not sure that it is fair. I think I imagine that because you have had, I hope you don’t mind me saying so, more difficulty learning to trust yourself, you have reached a more secure place.”

“I just wish you allowed yourself to be comfortable.”

“I am comfortable. At least more comfortable than I am comfortable with.”

Vimes remembered first moving into Scoone Avenue and feeling uncomfortable, even repulsed looking at the furnishings, the architecture, the paintings and armor and trophies on walls.

The few luxurious items in the palace were in the liquor cabinet, untouched by the Patrician, or in his bathroom in a not-entirely-vain attempt to cover for the effects of total asceticism elsewhere. Even the ‘good’ tallow candles reserved for the rooms of the Patrician weren’t as nice as the ones kept burning all evening along the corridors of the Ramkin house.

“You had money as a child,” Vimes observed.

Vetinari ran his thumb along the edge of a stone tile on the step he was sitting on. “They wouldn’t let me teach until I had my MA and the scholarship only covered school until I was eighteen so my aunt payed my way… There’s much more to it than that, of course. I could basically have anything I asked for but I felt that I should not ask for anything. So I thought I was spoiled and had difficulty accepting gifts, which means I was, in a way. It was all her own money. My father… didn’t take things seriously.”

“Is that why you don’t let yourself have things?”

“Nil lucre, sine mortifi.”

The inversion of the Assassin’s Guild motto had occurred to Vimes as it had likely occurred to many people who didn’t always read or hear words in the right order. It wasn’t true. Maybe all money _had_ passed through bloodied hands, but that didn’t mean you didn’t deserve compensation for work done and value created. But of course Vetinari would see it as an axiom applying only to himself.

“I killed Wolfgang von Überwald.” Vimes said. He wasn’t sure why he said it. Vetinari didn’t live in a world of rules and laws and exceptions. What he had were principles and morals and flexibility, trying to look at each situation afresh, with eyes unclouded by preconceptions, trusting himself. Vimes trusted himself enough to know when not to trust himself. He realized now that Vetinari didn’t and tried to ask for reassurance. Even if that reassurance was sitting next to him halfway up the stairs and offering to buy a takeaway curry.

“I know.”

“You haven’t answered the question.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about being like the people who left you a dungeon and a pit of scorpions.”

“I am the thing that kills the things I kill.”

“You look after people.”

“Obviously.”

So softly that Vetinari stopped breathing for a moment, Vimes said “Even me.”


End file.
